Fusion recipes and tahini with everything: how Molly Yeh, Food Network chef, mined her Chinese and Jewish heritage for some memorable pandemic mash-ups

Food Network star Molly Yeh took refuge in food during quarantine, baking bread and coming up with recipes such as kale matzo pizza or bacon and egg drop soup

The food blogger’s older cake recipes became popular again – think carrot cake with tahini caramel frosting, and mini pumpkin loaf cakes with cream cheese glaze

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Food Network star and chef Molly Yeh has balanced the frustrations and isolation of quarantine during Covid-19 with joyful moments with her family and experiments in the kitchen. Photo: AP

Published: 7:15am, 10 Jun 2021Updated: 7:15am, 10 Jun 2021

Somewhere between testing beet and carrot juice, blueberries and mint in search of the precise hues for a four-tiered rainbow cake celebrating her daughter’s first birthday in spring 2020, Food Network star Molly Yeh was forced by Covid-19’s gathering storm clouds to abruptly cancel the party she’d spent six months planning.

The food blogger and author of Molly on the Range: Recipes and Stories from An Unlikely Life on a Farm: A Cookbook had already sketched the tablescape, sent hand-drawn invitations incorporating the vegetable theme and crafted cute marzipan carrots as cake toppers.

Since then, the 32-year-old Yeh has balanced the daily frustrations and isolation of quarantine life with the many joyful firsts of her toddler, Bernie. The constant that has held it together is food, or in Yeh’s case, tahini. She’s fond of incorporating her favourite ingredient in original recipes that fuse her Chinese and Jewish heritage.

“Food has truly taken on a different meaning, both in starting a family and also in the pandemic,” says Yeh, who lives on a sugar beet farm with her husband and baby near the Minnesota-North Dakota border in the Midwest of the United States.

Yeh has balanced the frustrations and isolation of quarantine with the many joyful firsts of her toddler, Bernie. Photo: Molly Yeh

The young family never went to a restaurant and rarely ordered takeaway, cooking from scratch and finding delight in Bernie’s milestones, despite monotonous routines and seemingly endless household chores.